As President Barack Obama prepares for his State of the Union speech Tuesday night, the poll found that 38 percent of Americans picked out selected terms such as "recovering" and "hopeful" to describe the nation, which is a slight uptick from 12 months ago.

Although 48 percent of Americans chose negative descriptions about the country, such as "troubled" and "deteriorating," the number of Americans using those terms was less than a year ago.

The most popular description was "divided," with 40 percent using that word, which was a 3 percent increase over the number of people using it a year ago.

The poll recipients were asked to choose from one or two words out of a list of seven, says the Journal.

According to the poll, Democrats and Republicans had the same percentage of respondents who used the word "divided." Overall, however, Democrats picked positive terms, while Republicans picked words like "troubled," "deteriorating" or "broken."

The survey of 800 adults, which will be released in full on Tuesday, was conducted Jan. 14-17 and had a margin of error of plus or minus 4.9 percentage points.